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though I am a devotee of KDE I am lately using for my studies
an old P1-200 with fluxbox because its the faster wm ive found
so far, it's easy to customize and stable ( I used blackbox 0.65
- RPM , mdk 8.1 - on my main athlon 600 + 640 mbram but it
was unstable). Now I am doing fine with fluxbox ( slackware
package, slack 9.1) on the old iron,and the latest xfce ( source
compile) on sundays :-) . Both Qt designer and OpenOffice.org
run ok.
One last thing: kde still works at acceptable speed on a P I, if
properly configured.

I also have gained quite respect for XFCE lately. I tsill use KDE, b/c it seems to oddly run faster, but I made KDE look like it anyways. I hope it comes along well, but KDE is still much more customizable.

One thing i dont like about XFCE though... xffm. It irks me. I click on the folder on the left... it keeps it on the left. why would i want a two paned thing if the left one was useless?

Honestly. If you want revolutionary, you'll want a 3-D desktop. Once this comes out, all of these are going to have a lot of competition. KDE and GNOME will probably have the pressure to go 3-D. I predict that once its fully useable and accepted, Lg3d will come out on top.

The amount of resources you have available is irrelevant when speaking of wasted resources. Why use up a lot of system resources simply running your desktop? The whole point of any operating system is to give your computer the ability to do work, as in run applications.
As I stated before, IN MY OPINION, using system resources to run some fancy eye candy 3d desktop is a waste. It doesn't do anything to increase productivity. If your computer is just a toy intended to look good and have lots of eye candy something like that is fine, but if it's intended to actually do work, it's a waste of resources.

It makes no difference if you have a 386, or a K7 2400+ (like I do) or an Athlon 64 4000. All of the Desktop Environments are bloated. I use fvwm2. I have a nice, clean screen with a small panel in the lower right corner with a 'Quit' and a 'Restart' button. It also displays the date and time, and lets me pick which of the 9 areas of the desktop that I want to view. Other than that, I'm a mouse-click away from menus that can access just about anything that I use more than once a week. For anything else there is konsole. (I didn't say that I don't use anything from KDE, I just don't run the whole environment. I also like kate, from KDE. It is a great text editor.

I used to use FVWM2, but have since switched to Gnome. FVWM was an excellent desktop though, and I've seen nothing to beat the functionality of its pager since. You could set it to scroll around the huge virtual desktop. You could drag windows around the pager, or even off the pager. It worked well.

The only problem was that it (at the time) took a lot of work with config files to set up. It was very flexible, but hard work. That said - my desktop back in the mid 90s has a similar colour scheme and "prettyness" to XP now and was a lot prettier than other things around at the time.

I use both FB & KDE on two different boxes. My main system runs Debian with KDE, the second is an older system running DamnSmallLinux with FB. I like them both, but prefer KDE. FB is great for slower older boxes,but if you have the resources i'd say go for the KDE. Why not have the glit and glamour. :)
Oh yah, & I.M.H.O. Gnome sucks

I use both FB & KDE on two different boxes. My main system runs Debian with KDE, the second is an older system running DamnSmallLinux with FB. I like them both, but prefer KDE. FB is great for slower older boxes,but if you have the resources i'd say go for the KDE. Why not have the glit and glamour. :)
Oh yah, & I.M.H.O. Gnome sucks

I am a webmistress and use Quanta Plus to do web development. An excellent product but only available in KDE. Even if that were not the case, I still prefer KDE's polished look and feel over Gnome. Haven't really tried any others. I agree that I wish Firefox was the default browser instead of Konqueror.

I have a dual boot system (currently Kubuntu and WinXP) with my Firefox profile on a FAT32 partition so I can access my bookmarks, history, etc. from either OS. (I wouldn't dare to do that with Konqueror. I mean, what's the Windoze equivalent?)

I have a dual boot system (currently Kubuntu and WinXP) with my Firefox profile on a FAT32 partition so I can access my bookmarks, history, etc. from either OS. (I wouldn't dare to do that with Konqueror. I mean, what's the Windoze equivalent?)

Konqueror was written using the Mozilla source, so the older Mozilla broswer, Netscape, or possibly even Firefox, might be able to handle it.